@SafeasMilk,

The actions of the Dover school board during the Dover trial was not condoned or supported by the Discovery Institute. "Creationism" is typically understood to mean young-earth creationism unless you add a qualifier (e.g. "progressive creationist"). Even at that, creationism generally refers to an attempt to read scientific data through the lens of a particular interpretation of Scripture. This is not my approach.

Rumraket wrote:

Jonathan McLatchie wrote:In any case, why is this supposedly "the most shocking thing a creationist has ever done"?

I have genuinely NEVER seen it happen before.

And you still haven't.

Jonathan McLatchie wrote:@SafeasMilk,

The actions of the Dover school board during the Dover trial was not condoned or supported by the Discovery Institute. "Creationism" is typically understood to mean young-earth creationism unless you add a qualifier (e.g. "progressive creationist"). Even at that, creationism generally refers to an attempt to read scientific data through the lens of a particular interpretation of Scripture. This is not my approach.

No, of course not:


Is There Evidence for a Real Adam and Eve? By Jonathan McLatchie



BTW, in the interest of full disclosure I am the same person who goes by the name "lutesuite" on Larry Moran's blog, and who commented on your facebook page under my real name Faizal Ali.

Welcome to Rational Skepticism.

You are correc wrt to the number of functional pseudogenes not being just 12, I don't remember where I got that number.

Jonathan McLatchie wrote:@SafeasMilk,

The actions of the Dover school board during the Dover trial was not condoned or supported by the Discovery Institute.

Yeah, because the DiscoTute bailed when they saw they were going to lose big time.

"Creationism" is typically understood to mean young-earth creationism unless you add a qualifier (e.g. "progressive creationist").

And ID is very careful to try to pretend that they have nothing to do with Creationism, young-Earth or old-Earth, because they are trying to pretend that they aren't a religious viewpoint. However, certain smoking guns (cdesign proponentsists) give it away.

Even at that, creationism generally refers to an attempt to read scientific data through the lens of a particular interpretation of Scripture.

As opposed to ID, which tries to read scientific data through the lens of a non-specified "Designer" who happens to share all attributed with the Christian Deity.

This is not my approach.

Love to hear your approach, and how it differs from the plainly religious approach of the DiscoTute.

@Weaver:

No, the Discovery Institute attempted, unsuccessfully, to persuade the Dover school board not to go through with what they were doing. It has been Discovery's long time education policy to oppose attempts to mandate the teaching of ID in public schools. The foolish actions of the Dover school board did a lot of damage, and we saw an intense spike in academic persecution of ID scientists following 2005.

As to my approach, I seek to determine the most natural interpretation of the scientific evidence. I think there are clear hallmarks of design in biology, but I would be inclined to affirm the proposition of common ancestry, for reasons I'm happy to go into.

Jonathan McLatchie wrote: I think there are clear hallmarks of design in biology

Such as?

@Rumraket,

Such as the digitally-encoded information intrinsic to the hereditary molecules of DNA and RNA. In every other realm of experience, complex and specified information uniformly traces its origin back to an intelligent source.

Jonathan McLatchie wrote:@Weaver:

No, the Discovery Institute attempted, unsuccessfully, to persuade the Dover school board not to go through with what they were doing. It has been Discovery's long time education policy to oppose attempts to mandate the teaching of ID in public schools. The foolish actions of the Dover school board did a lot of damage, and we saw an intense spike in academic persecution of ID scientists following 2005.

The reason being that the the DI had already decided that the strategy pursued by the Dover board was doomed, and had decided to switch to its current "Teach the controversy" policy, to try and wedge its religious beliefs into American public school curriculla.

Anyway, whether the DI supported the Dover board is irrelevant to the question of whether ID is merely a subtype of creationism. That question can be decisively answered with two neologistic words: "cdesign proponentsists".

Yeah, the DiscoTute has made great efforts to revise the history and to claim that they had nothing to do with the Dover School Board's embrace of ID.

Fortunately, historical records still exist.

http://sensuouscurmudgeon.wordpress.com ... institute/

They sought and were given legal advice and educational materials, both printed and video, with which they made their decision to use DiscoTute-approved sources in their quest to teach ID Creationism in their classrooms.

Jonathan McLatchie wrote:@Rumraket,

Such as the digitally-encoded information intrinsic to the hereditary molecules of DNA and RNA. In every other realm of experience, complex and specified information uniformly traces its origin back to an intelligent source.

That's meaningless since we know for a fact that evolution directly creates gene-sequences through mutation, drift and selection. You're essentially saying that evolution itself is an intelligent process.

Jonathan McLatchie wrote:@Rumraket,

Such as the digitally-encoded information intrinsic to the hereditary molecules of DNA and RNA. In every other realm of experience, complex and specified information uniformly traces its origin back to an intelligent source.

Ah, yes, "complex specified information". Yet another creationist buzzphrase that means exactly nothing.

@Shrunk: The DI's education policy predates Dover. Attempting to push ID into public schools politicizes the issue and is counter-productive to the long term goals of our research community.

Regarding the 1980s Pandas textbook, I don't know a huge amount about that. But my understanding is that words like "creation" were used in a sense very different from classical creationism. In any case, I didn't have anything to do with the Pandas textbook. I wasn't even born when it was written.

Also, let's not forget the DiscoTute's Wedge Document, which clearly outlines the goal of the DiscoTute to replace science as with “theistic and Christian science” and “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God.”

Yeah, no religion there ...

Jonathan McLatchie wrote:
Regarding the 1980s Pandas textbook, I don't know a huge amount about that. But my understanding is that words like "creation" were used in a sense very different from classical creationism. In any case, I didn't have anything to do with the Pandas textbook. I wasn't even born when it was written.

Before you carry on with any more defense on a subject about which you say you have significant ignorance, I strongly suggest you follow some of the links I put up and educate yourself. The "creationism" referred to in the original Pandas text was classic Christian Creationism, and ID was invented as a way to try to get around the Edward vs. Aguillard Supreme Court decision outlawing it in public schools.

@Weaver,

I'm already familiar with the claims that are made. But I don't know very much about the Pandas textbook (I've never read it and I don't own a copy). I find the evidence for design in biology compelling, and that is what is important as far as I'm concerned.

@Shrunk,

Regarding the claim that the concept of specified complexity is meaningless, I suggest you read my blog post here:

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/08/tw ... 75771.html

Rumraket writes,

That's meaningless since we know for a fact that evolution directly creates gene-sequences through mutation, drift and selection. You're essentially saying that evolution itself is an intelligent process.

I dispute the power of selection, mutation, drift, etc, to craft fundamentally new genes and proteins. But here I was referring specifically to the origins of the digitally-encoded information in the first place (for which I think intelligent design is the best explanation), back at the dawn of life some 3.8 billion years ago.

Jonathan McLatchie wrote:@Shrunk,

Regarding the claim that the concept of specified complexity is meaningless, I suggest you read my blog post here:

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/08/tw ... 75771.html

You write that:
"Unlike a random assembly of alphabetic and punctuation characters (which exhibits complexity), the sentences and paragraphs in this (or any) article exhibit what ID theorists call "specified complexity." That is to say, the sequences of characters are organized in a particular way to convey meaning to people who are acquainted with the English language. ID proponents argue that specified complexity uniformly arises from intelligent causes, not the unguided forces of nature."

- But this is what we already know is false. Evolution produces new gene sequences, and the evolutionary process is not, as far as we can tell, guided by anything, but is a purely natural process.